We had a problem recently with getting a new Blackberry device activated for a customer who was on the Microsoft BPOS platform and using their hosted Blackberry Enterprise Server service. Up until this point we had had very few problems with this combination. We setup a new mailbox and activated a blackberry device for the personal assistant of the main partner at the business. All good, everything working as expected, no problems.
We added the blackberry service to the Partner's BPOS account, set the activation password and talked the user through activating their blackberry….
Nothing. Activation failed
Worked through the usual, checking for user error typing in password, checking their mailbox for the blackberry activation messages, checking the network, wiping the blackberry, retrying activation. Nothing.
We removed the user from the blackberry portal in BPOS, added them back. Still no activation.
We used a number of test & spare blackberry devices – none of these would activate
Both the PA and the Partner also had iPhones setup against their BPOS Exchange accounts. We removed these devices. Wiped the blackberry and re-tried activation. Nothing.
We raised this to the BPOS tech support guys. A number of rounds later, no success. Customer understandably starting to get a little flustered as were we. This highlighted one of the down sides to hosted blackberry and exchange services in that when a problem arises on a Blackberry Server we have admin access to we are able to get pretty low-down right away with access to all the logs and inner workings – with the BPOS platform we had none of this and had to wait for issue/response/reply/response and so on.
Eventually the problem was raised to RIM tech support by the guys at BPOS - again re-enforcing this down side – we would have raised this issue a lot sooner if it was our server
The solution was not immediate and took a couple of rounds of back and forth with the RIM chaps to finally track this down to a rule in Outlook which the Partner had setup which we didn't know about – in hindsight we should have looked through the Outlook rules.
The rule forwarded a copy of every email to his PA. ‘Obviously’ (we think it is now…) this was also forwarding the special activation email with the ETP.DAT attachment to the PA which is required to close the activation loop between device, blackberry infrastructure and email account. The PA’s device was already activated and on the same domain, on the same exchange server and also on the same BES server – it appears that the PAs device was effectively replying to the BES infrastructure that it was already activated – end of the activation at the BES server end. The Partner’s device would not activate.
We temporarily disabled the Outlook rule, activated the device, re-enabled the Outlook rule and everything working as expected…
